The Inquirer continues to foam at the mouth and scream apocalyptically through their greasy beard, the soothsayer of an upcoming Nvidia apocalypse which will doom, doom, DOOM us all.
Following up their initial claim that all Nvidia G84 and G86 series GPU chipsets are bad, The Inquirer now claims we can add G92s and G94s to the list:
It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates. If you know what failures look like statistically, they follow a Poisson distribution, aka a bell curve. The failures start out small, and ramp up quickly – very quickly. If you know what you are looking for, you can catch the signs early on. From the sound of the backchannel grumblings, the failures have been flagged already, and NV isn’t playing nice with their partners.
Why wouldn’t they? Well, the G92 chip is used in the 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, several mobile flavours of 8800, most of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants just to confuse buyers. The G94 is basically only the 9600GT. Basically we are told all G92 and G94 variants are susceptible to the same problem – basically they are all defective. Any guesses as to how much this is going to cost?
From the look of it, all G8x variants other than the G80, and all G9x variants are defective, but we have only been able to get people to comment directly on the G84, G86, G92 and G94, and all variants thereof. Since Nvidia is not acknowledging the obvious G84 and G86 problems, don’t look for much word on this new set either – if they can bury it, it will drop their costs.
Nvidia is being incredibly mum about their GPU problems. On one hand, that could be because there are no real problems… but forum boards don’t bear that out, and accusations are getting far too hysterical not to respond to. At this point, Nvidia’s silence is looking incriminating: they aren’t admitting the problem because they can’t… it’s a company sinker.
Nvidia G92s and G94 reportedly failing [The Inquirer]
Previously:
The Inquirer: All Nvidia G84s AND G86s are bad – Boing Boing Gadgets
Links to those forum posts that support The Inquirer, please? Gizmodo covered this one, and some of its readers are skeptical. Having a higher-than-usual failure rate isn’t the same thing as ZOMG THEIR ALL GONNA GO UP IN FLAEMS CLAS AKSHUN SOOT LOLAWYERZ. Even if they do die a little sooner, most of their users will have long since upgraded.
Poisson distribution =/= bell curve.
Isn’t a bell curve a Gaussian distribution?
Poissonian arrival times for network traffic don’t apply here.
Something smells fishy.
That journalist doesn’t know jack about statistic.
Quelle surprise.
Does this mean that the price of 8800s is gonna go through the floor? I don’t care if they break if i can get like, six for a hundred quid…
#3
I see what you did there.
Also, I’m honestly surprised anybody takes The Inquirer with less than several spoonfuls of salt. If everything they say is true Microsoft and Israel would have crushed the world under their jackbooted heels long ago.
Since they’re the only GPU maker who bothers making stereo vision drivers, I sincerely hope the Inquirer is wrong.
DirectX Stereo vision is just too cool for gaming, for them to go under.
Shame most people haven’t even noticed it exists, let along gone out and bought a headset.
Let me know when this is used with GPUs in laptops and useful for something other than gaming.
I’ve been looking forward to my Snow Crash / Johnny Mnemonic / Ghost in the Shell goggles for “surfing the Internet” for a long long while now.
Neither Gaussian nor Poisson distribution are normally (pun intended) used for failure data. Weibull and others are common.
“I’ve been looking forward to my Snow Crash / Johnny Mnemonic / Ghost in the Shell goggles for “surfing the Internet” for a long long while now”
You *do* mean Thompson Eyephones don’t you?